Long live Palestine!
Workers World, Vol. 12, No. 17, October 30, 1970
By Naomi Cohen
New York, Oct. 16 – A huge orange banner proclaiming “Long Live the Palestine Revolution” hung over the stage of Columbia University’s McMillan Theater tonight at a solidarity meeting with the Palestine Revolution. Close to 500 people attended the meeting to hear keynote speakers Sam Marcy, Chairman of Workers World Party, and Muhamad Sultan, a member of the Central Committee of the Armed Struggle Command of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a representative of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
JDL STAYS AWAY
This meeting was organized by Columbia Youth Against War & Fascism and took place just a few days after the fascist JDL (so-called Jewish Defense League) in collaboration with the police attacked a pro-Arab demonstration on campus. Tight security was maintained by a defense force of over 100 members of YAWF and the Iranian Students Association. Everyone entering the hall was searched, a procedure which many of those in attendance felt reflected the seriousness of the situation.
In the face of this defense, however, the few punks from the JDL who did show up were either quickly ejected or else chose wisely to leave quietly. Without their pig protectors, the JDLers aren’t so brave. Their only recourse was to toss some tear gas into the hall. However, the crowd was clearly made up of enthusiastic supporters of the Arab liberation struggle, so after momentary shifting in the room to avoid the gas, the meeting was resumed amid chants of “Palestine Will Win.”
Danny Luce of Columbia YAWF opened the meeting with a call for building a mass movement against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Mideast. He then introduced Rita Freed, chairwoman of the Committee to Support Middle East Liberation, who chaired tonight’s meeting. She began by saying unequivocally, “We are calling this a solidarity meeting because teach-ins always allow the government side to be heard ... But U.S. imperialism and their puppets in Tel Aviv have had 22 years to tell their myth of the ‘independence’ of Israel. The ruling class in this country is united on the issue of the Mideast so we have to be equally united, equally partisan in support of the Palestinian revolution and in support of the Arab liberation struggle.”
WWP CHAIRMAN SPEAKS
The strong partisan character of the meeting was hit home by the remarks of the chairman of Workers World Party, Sam Marcy, who began his talk on the subject of the recent massacre of the Palestinian people in Jordan. “Where were all the humanitarians who speak out against violence, murder, pillage and plunder?” he asked. “Where were they during those days in Amman when 15,000 people – men, women and children – were massacred? ... And who did it? Hussein was only the triggerman. The men who did it are in Washington! They are the ones who plotted the liquidation of the Palestinian organizations. Why? Because for the first time on the Arab peninsula there has grown up a revolutionary movement that is indigenous to the land and seeks to take destiny in its own hands.”
Speaking about the so-called “independence” of the state of Israel, Comrade Marcy commented, “I feel very said when I think that Jewish people feel that the Nixon administration, that the Agnews and the Thurmonds and the Eastlands and the Stennises are deeply concerned about Israel or Judaism. They say they are going to help ‘little Israel’ because at bottom they are all humanitarians! Can’t you just see it – Strom Thurmond is the one who shot the students down in South Carolina – he’s a ‘humanitarian’ when it comes to Israel ...
“There could be no greater misunderstanding than the idea that a school teacher from Milwaukee by the name of Golda Meir, when she meets Melvin Laird, also from Milwaukee, will be treated as the representative of an independent state. That is ridiculous! She can’t even run for President in this country because she was born in Europe – but she can be the Premier of a land that is inhabited by millions and millions of Arab people.”
Comrade Marcy then went into some of the history of imperialist domination of the Middle East – their overriding interest in dominating that strategic area for military and economic (oil) purposes. He ended by pointing out that “our first task and most elementary duty, without which all other politics reduces itself to mere theorizing, is to get the U.S. off the backs of the Arab people. Long live Palestine!”
REPORT FROM PALESTINE
Before Sam Marcy spoke, a message of solidarity sent from Buffalo, New York, was read by Dan Bentivogli, the head of YAWF there. It had been signed by YAWF, the Western New York Veteran’s Union, the Mideast Caucus of the High School Students Union and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. (Dan Bentivogli is presently facing approximately 150 years in prison on charges growing out of YAWF’s participation in the student rebellion at the University of Buffalo last year.)
Two American students who recently returned from the Middle East related some of their experiences with the Arab guerrillas. Joe Center, who organized the Committee to Liberate Palestine at City College here, gave a short history of the Israeli state and the struggle of the Palestinian people. Marilyn Lowen stressed that Zionism is using the Jewish people as a tool of imperialism and read several poems she had written on the Arab liberation struggle.
Of particular interest were Marilyn’s remarks on the women in the Palestinian struggle. “Palestinian women have said that they will not meet the same fate as the Algerian women, who were allowed to fight in the revolution but afterward many of them had to go back to their old way of life.” As the struggle has increased, she related, women have had to be allowed to participate more and more. “The women on the trip saw that the Women’s Liberation struggle here cannot exist outside of the total revolution, that there is no way for us as women to be liberated unless we destroy American imperialism which is oppressing our sisters and brothers all over the world.”
ASU, IRANIAN SOLIDARITY
Andy Stapp of the American Servicemen’s Union contributed a great deal to the meeting in relation to how the GIs feel about the war in the Middle East. “The rank and file GI is sick and tired of being used as a pawn for the imperialists who will tell them, we are going to send you to the Middle East so you can get killed for the oil monopolies. And in every unit that was called up (during the Jordan civil war) there are active members of the ASU. They have taken action; they have handed out hundreds of leaflets explaining that this is the same kind of war as in Vietnam – a war of U.S. imperialism against an oppressed people.”
Also expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause was the Iranian Students Association, a group of Iranian revolutionaries in exile from the U.S.-backed fascist regime of the Shah. “The heroic armed revolution of the Palestinian people gives testimony to the fact that the new upsurge in the struggle against U.S. imperialism is now emerging throughout the world ... The Palestinians are waging a struggle against U.S. imperialism and its lackeys at a time when U.S. imperialism is receiving crushing blows from the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and is isolated throughout the world by the uprisings of anti-imperialist struggles and wars of national liberation in countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”
The keynote speaker of the evening, Muhamad Sultan of the DPF, began by expressing his revolutionary greetings to the “friends and comrades, in the name of the Palestinian armed struggle and in the name of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” His analysis of the events in Jordan, particularly how the Palestinian liberation struggle has affected the masses of workers there, were especially interesting since facts about the revolutionary events in the Mideast very rarely get into the bourgeois press here.
“If we had conceived of our struggle as purely a military one,” he declared, “the king, the reactionary regimes and the imperialists would not have been too unhappy with us.” However, he pointed out, the Palestinians and particularly the DPF, have viewed the organizing of the masses as “the very heart and core of the struggle.” This has meant that the Jordanian people now fully support the Palestinian struggle. “We challenge (the king) to take one trip to Irbid as the ruler of the people!
“With the rise of the Palestinian armed struggle, workers began to form a certain spontaneous ability to maneuver much better than before. And due to instigation both explicit and implicit on our part, the first labor strike occurred. We in the DPF and our comrades in the PFLP had to send armed men to protect these strikes at the beginning. But the strikes took and the workers got their demands, humble as they were.”
THE FIRST ARAB SOVIET!
Muhamad Sultan described how people’s organizations arose – teachers’ unions, women’s unions and students’ unions – under the impetus and protection of the Palestinian struggle. These unions were in the forefront of the demonstrations to support the Palestinians during every crisis. It is for this reason that the king “tried to liquidate the Palestinian armed struggle.”
It was the large people’s militia, trained by the Palestinian organizations, which did most of the fighting in the recent crisis, Sultan explained. “They were on every rooftop, in every room, in every hall and every ditch. It took the king’s army two or three hours to flush two snipers out of a building” – that is why they had to bomb each building to the ground.
Another important experiment which the DPF has pushed for in the movement as a whole has been the organization of the first Arab Soviet in Irbid. “Newsweek magazine had to concede that something very important did emerge there. We are experimenting with the idea of the People’s Councils.” These would be elected by the people in their villages, factories, schools, etc., and would be responsible for everything from defense to sanitation.
It was clear from Muhamad Sultan’s talk that the Palestinian revolution is moving forward not only to regain their homeland, but to transform the face of the Middle East. The fact that the U.S. puppet regime carried out a massacre in Jordan is more easily understandable in the light of the fact that they so fear the emergence of real “people’s power” in the midst of the old reactionary regime. The Palestinian people are not fighting just to go back to the old order of capitalist slavery, but are organizing for the future – a socialist future in Palestine.
Last updated: 11 May 2026